


Like a well-fitting garment which does not pull anywhere

by birdmage



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Gen, Identity Issues, Jotunn Loki (Marvel), Mild Blood, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), but the type where people talk to each other a bunch, ignores infinity war, there is also a Space Adventure
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-17
Updated: 2018-02-22
Packaged: 2019-02-15 23:25:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13041705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/birdmage/pseuds/birdmage
Summary: A buzzing built in his skull, headache thrumming against his temples, and he felt a pressure in his face. Nosebleed. Inconvenient, but only an annoyance. He grabbed a cloth off of the basin, and leaned over the sink to let the blood drip, but stopped short. In the mirror, the blood running down his face was a dark, ugly blue – almost black. Like ichor.He doesn't tell anyone. He doesn't need to. He'll fix it eventually. He always does. Besides, on a ship full of refugees floating through the blackness of space, what does he have but time?Until suddenly time starts to run out.





	1. some imperceptibly, little by little

**Author's Note:**

> Title and chapter titles from Tainaron: Mail from Another City by Leena Krohn

The nebula loomed in great gleaming pillars outside the plate-glass window, cold dust swirling into bulky shapes like hunched giants bundled in yellow cloaks and speckled with sharp pinpricks of green light. Valkyrie swirled a glass of something blue in one hand that gave off a harsh smell like strawberries and vinegar; it wasn’t the best she’d ever had, but it was far, far from the worst, and she couldn’t exactly afford to be picky considering the current state of affairs.

She was sitting in some sort of cargo bay, vacant but for her and the huge window framing the emptiness of space; it had been empty when they’d boarded, and there were few enough refugees that parts of the ship were still relatively empty. And wasn’t that an encouraging thought. All of Asgard’s might reduced to a couple thousand scared people, floating helpless in space. _Perhaps_ , she thought, _in some ways it had deserved to burn_. The golden realm had certainly rained its own share of destruction down on others – but, no. Almost all of those that remained were commoners, and they, for the most part, were too young to remember the zenith of Asgard’s conquering days. They were victims of Hela; they weren’t the gleeful collection of lords and councilors that had orbited the Allfather and his Executioner, eager for the spoils of war. The same nobles that had acted so shocked when Hela wouldn’t be reined in just because Odin had decided to try out the fit of benevolence and treaties. Shocked, as if Hela wasn’t exactly what she’d been made to be. And when Death herself came crashing at their gates, those nobles would have sacrificed anything, anyone, just to save the skin on their backs. And they had.

_Allfather, the Einherjar simply won’t be enough. She’s too close to the heart of the city. Surely, it’s high time we sent in the Valkyrior? We need as much strength as we can possibly muster. We should send all of them, don’t you think?_

She knocked back a mouthful of her drink, effectively ending that train of thought with the quick flare of chemical burning. She could feel it coating her throat on the way down. _Ugh, like syrup poured straight into rubbing alcohol._

Someone behind her coughed conspicuously, and she very deliberately didn’t turn around.

“What is it, Lackey?”

A couple of soft footfalls later, and Loki came into her peripheral vision.

He raised his hands placatingly. “Nothing, nothing. I didn’t know you would be in here and, ah, I thought it best not to sneak up on you.”

She snorted. “You couldn’t sneak up on me.”

Choosing not to comment, he instead lowered himself to the floor and sat cross-legged a few feet away.

She turned to look at him. “You sure you don’t want something?”

He shook his head. “I just wanted some quiet,” he said.

She nodded. “Good. Good that you don’t want anything, because I’m not particularly in the giving mood. Unless you’d be interested in a dagger? My choice of placement.” She took a sip of her drink. “Though, of course, I’m already gifting you with my presence.”

He snorted quietly. “And I’m _so_ very grateful for that. You’re truly generous beyond measure.”

She raised her glass at him. “Aren’t I just.” But, _he was lying_. He hadn’t just stumbled in on her while looking for somewhere to mope in peace. There were plenty of other empty spaces on the ship if he’d really wanted that. No, he’d been looking for company. But why? She shot him a glance out of the corner of her eye. He had changed out of battle leathers and into clothes involving significantly fewer buckles and straps and a great deal more soft cloth. It was technically night cycle, so maybe he just couldn’t sleep. But again, no. There were dark circles under his eyes, almost black, and his hair was even greasier than usual. This wasn’t just a one-night thing. He looked like shit.

“You look like shit.”

He raised his eyebrows at her.

She didn’t particularly like him, but the less irritable he was, the less likely he’d be to pull any real mischief. “No, really. You look like shit, have you checked in with a healer? Hiding any secret gaping wounds?”

He gave a dry little laugh at that. “Yes, you’ve got me. I’ve been run through with a great big sword, but I’ve been standing at strategic angles, so no one’s noticed yet.” He stared out into the blackness of space, folding his legs out from under himself and crossing them at the ankles. “Besides,” he said, eyes on the bright swirling columns of gas, “I’m not even sure if we have any healers on board. Haven’t organized enough to check.”

She nodded at that. “You could ask Banner?” The man had shrunk back into himself a few days after the battle without any warning and the Hulk had yet to reappear.

Loki made a show of checking his bare wrist. “Well, would you look at the time.” He shot to his feet and was out of the room before she could get another word in.

She rolled her eyes and took a sip of her drink. _Ass._

****

Loki stumbled back into his chambers, inelegantly turning the lights to low on his way in with a loose gesture against the control panel. It had been foolish of him, seeking out company. Much less her company. But Thor might have guessed, and their relationship was beyond complex anyways, too difficult – too much history and antagonism wrapped up in a bond that Loki didn’t want to admit was there. And Thor would look at him, doing that soft, sad thing with his eye, and say something like, _Oh Loki_ , and then he’d probably want to talk about their _feelings_. Definitely not.

Valkyrie hated him, but it was a nice, uncomplicated hatred. Go in, trade a few barbs, get his mind off of things. It hadn’t really worked that well, but better this than Thor weeping over the loss of their father’s ravens or the kitchens or whatever else it would be tonight. (Who was he kidding, it was for the people. It was always for the people.)

He crossed the cabin to the little attached bathroom, a shudder wracking his frame, little silvery shards of magic splintering off of him and shattering into nothingness. There it was. His few minutes of respite were over. Of course, he had tried to patch it with his seidr, but it was as a tarp thrown over a collapsing building. And years of maintaining an illusion as Odin, followed by Sakaar and the battle with Hela, had sapped considerable strength he had yet to get back.

A buzzing built in his skull, headache thrumming against his temples, and he felt a pressure in his face. Nosebleed. Inconvenient, but only an annoyance. He grabbed a cloth off of the basin, and leaned over the sink to let the blood drip, but stopped short. In the mirror, the blood running down his face was a dark, ugly blue – almost black. Like ichor. It ran down his chin as he watched, a well springing from some source of rot deep within himself. He winced, breaking eye-contact with his reflection. Letting his eyelids drop and concentrating, he drew his seidr around him and threaded it carefully through the widening cracks he could feel. The thin green filaments he wove were sluggish and reluctant to do their task, but after a few minutes the patch job was good enough. He opened his eyes.

The blood dripping into the sink was red.

He shut off the lights and left the bathroom, suddenly beyond exhaustion. The bed was soft when he collapsed into it, and the gentle hum of the ship’s systems, filtering stifling air through the room, eventually carried him off for a few hours of fitful sleep.


	2. others quickly and once and for all

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It took a hot minute to get this written and posted, but, you know, finals  
> I should be on a more regular schedule now though -- weekly chapters, maybe more often than that even

Somewhere, there was singing. The currents of dark water pulled at his legs, stretching them like taffy into the depths. A stream of bubbles escaped from his nose and rose sideways. Disembodied light danced and refracted sections of the black water into spinning crystalline patterns, pale as eggshells. The sound of the tide crackled and beat in his ears. If he could swim anywhere, in any direction, he could escape this passage, this unworld. His shoulders rotated and a hand passed in front of him, swiping at the water, black and grey and blue. His head broke water; he did not gasp. He bobbed in and out, catching glimpses of the surface – a brushed-metal corridor, red emergency lights, a jagged circle cut into the floor which gushed water. The singing came to him still, louder now but muffled, like a choir on the other side of a thick cotton wall. If he could only crawl onto the deck…

A grip on his ankle – he was yanked back under. A piercing burst of tinnitus rolled through his ears like a sharp cannonade. His own face gaped up at him from the blackness, blanched and twisted into a hateful death mask, over-bright eyes rolled back into sockets. Water rushed; all was silent.

Loki fully woke with his feet already swung onto the floor, a dagger summoned in each hand, a breath caught in his throat. He blinked, clearing the sleep from his eyes, then laid back. No alarms or announcements rang through the halls, but he had rolled out of bed ready to fight. He ached like an old man. His hands looked the same as ever, but he felt as if he should be able to see the balls of knotted joints swelling under his skin. A headache rocked from temple to temple, clacking against his skull like a metronome.

Already the dream was fading; something about drowning, singing, fingers digging into his ankle: that was all that was left. He banished the daggers and let his head drop against the thin pillow, eyes sliding shut. He seidr trembled, not spent, only uncomfortably clenched. It whined and reluctantly continued to hold the bindings in the gouges which had once held hooks of Odin’s magic. Even before, when he had touched the Casket, when he had frozen Heimdall, those hooks had held; they had only melted away when Odin died. He couldn’t let them go, couldn’t let whatever they were holding unfold; he just needed to perfect the same binding that Odin had used. That was all.

He hummed to himself, some nameless operatic tune. The magic would hold for the time being. He opened his eyes and squinted at the clock set into the wall, which told him he had a few hours until he had to actually get up. He pulled the blankets over him, though he wasn’t at all cold. A deeper sleep slowly rolled over him.

His magic took up the humming, quiet and melodic. And, somewhere out in the black, it was answered in harmony.

****

Korg drummed his fingers on the table with a sound like gravel crunching under a boot. The flimsy paper playing cards crinkled in the grip of his other hand. He nudged Miek with his shoulder and whispered in a voice just a few decibels below shouting, “Psst, hey. Having a lot of the ones with the little purple lady on ‘em is good right?”

All three of the Asgardians across the table folded in tandem, laying their cards down on the table, one man groaning audibly. Miek’s mandibles rattled together in a tone that could only be chastising.

“Okay, okay. No need to be rude.” Korg looked down at his cards again. Stars zinged past the window, elongated by speed into thin silver spears. A middle-aged Aesir woman in a slouching leather hat whispered something to the red-cheeked man sitting beside her, who in turn barked out something that could’ve been a cough or a laugh.

Korg looked up again. “Oh, does that mean I win?” He dropped his cards on the table face-up, and the ruddy-faced man gave a low whistle and nodded. Korg grinned. “Oh! Lovely! Absolutely love cards.” He swept his opponents’ little piles of scrap metal into his much larger pile.

_Crack!_ The ship lurched like it had been given a good kick, lights dimming to near-darkness.

_CRACK!_ The hull shuddered and creaked dangerously around them. Cards and metal bits spilled to the floor as the table tipped up on one leg and then toppled. The flimsy metal chairs rattled against the deck; one slammed backwards and sent one of the women rolling across the floor and into the wall with a dull smack.

Silence reigned as the lights slowly blinked back on. Korg busied himself with gathering cards off of the floor. The Aesir woman not against the wall righted the table, and Korg sat back at it, shuffling the battered deck. “Right. Another round? Who wants me to deal again?”

The red-faced man sputtered. “Something just slammed us! Who’s to say it didn’t tear a great gash down the hull? And we’re days from any other realms!” He ran a hand down his face. “Oh Norns.”

Shaking her head, the woman in the leather hat clapped a hand on his shoulder. “If the hull had been breached we would already know, Sindri.”

The man shot her a goggle-eyed look. “What do you think happened then? We hit something; you felt it! The whole ship felt it! And it felt big, didn’t it? It felt really big.”

Korg blew out a little _pfft_ sound. “Nahh, not _that_ big. We just hit an asteroid, just a little asteroid or two. Happens all the time in space, yeah?”

This placated the man, if only barely. Korg started dealing out cards. The woman at the table turned to the younger woman who was still sitting against the wall, rubbing her head. “Unnr, would you care to join us?”

The woman against the wall slowly stood, but instead of returning to the table, she strode to the window.

The sitting woman gave her a questioning glance. “Did you hit your head on the way down?”

She was paid no mind as Unnr put her palms up against the glass. “Look at the stars.”

Korg raised his head. “What was that?”

She tapped a finger against the glass. “Look at the stars. They should be streaking by, but we’ve stopped.” The light outside cast her face in black and white, a pale mask embroidered with silver. “And the space around us is completely empty” Her fingernail clicked on the window. “No asteroids, no nothing.”

****

Heimdall stood impassively in the observation deck, hands folded on the hilt of the Bifrost sword. Stars beaded the deep black velvet of space, and the way ahead was clear; flying conditions were perfect. But something had hit the ship. Or rather, something had pushed against the ship. Resisting, until they had…broken through it? He had seen something, felt something, but had no idea what to make of it. His mouth was dry.

He turned around, and within a few seconds had company.

“And I’m telling you! I have no idea!”

The door bounced against the wall. The king entered, closely followed by his wildly gesticulating brother.

Thor nodded at Heimdall and then turned to face Loki. “Okay, benefit of the doubt. You had nothing to do with this. But you’re really telling me you didn’t feel anything? Big thump, but nothing out there to hit? Sounds like a magic thing. You sure it wasn’t a magic thing?”

Loki sighed. “Look, I’m not saying it wasn’t a…magic thing, but whatever it was, I can’t make heads or tails of it. I’m as in the dark as you are.” He paused and reconsidered. “Well, probably not _as_ in the dark as you are.” He made a little stabbing motion with his pointer finger towards Thor’s eyepatch.

Thor batted his hand out of the air and made a little dismissive sound. Using his other hand, Loki shot a little green stinging dart of magic back at him.

Thor made a _bring it on_ motion with his hands. “You really wanna start this?”

Rolling his eyes, Loki let the elbow he had been primed to dig into Thor’s side drop. “No, I suppose not. It does always seem to end with you shoving my face into your sweaty armpit.”

Smiling widely, Thor clapped him on the back. “Who said you were getting predictable? Look at all this character development.”

“Thor, you were the one who said I was getting pre- “

Heimdall cleared his throat without turning around, intent on staring out of the window. “Your majesty,” he started. His mouth really was very dry. “I would suggest looking outside.”

Thor crossed over to join him, tilting his head and trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

On the horizon, a ship melted out of the dark. Bulky and dirty white, it hung against the fabric of space, dead. It wasn’t moving towards them, nor they towards it; rather, it had appeared, simply spat into existence.

Loki crossed to the window and leaned against it, face screwed up in concentration. Heimdall saw him go even paler under the glamor that hid his exhaustion, and Loki turned to look first at him and then Thor, saying, “There’s…something. It’s reacting to my seidr, and it’s approaching; it’s approaching fast, and it’s singi–” he stopped. “Are your—do either of you have really bad dry mouth all of the sudden?”


	3. (but everyone changes)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait; life intervened, as it does. But now I'm back! Here's a longer chapter to hopefully make up for the wait a little. And the next chapter's already underway! Thanks for all of the kudos and bookmarks and comments!

Valkyrie tapped a finger against the flashing instrument panel of the water filtration system like it would change anything. This was _not good_. The young aesir engineer hovered behind her nervously, occasionally flitting over to check in with the other engineers or to bang on the pipes. It was getting on her nerves, but she didn’t snap at him even a little, new leaf and all.

Eventually, she broke the silence. “And there’s nothing wrong with the engine? The only anomalous readings are _here_ of all places?”

The young man hurried to her side. “Truthfully, we haven’t had the time to run a whole-system diagnostic, but yes; by all accounts we’re undamaged and should be moving along by now.” He started to clear his throat, but finished in a fit of dry coughing.

She gave him a good few thumps on the back to guide him through it, perhaps slightly harder than necessary. They seemed to clear him up and he continued, “But even without the mysterious invisible engine problems, this alone is cause enough for concern. Look here.” He leaned over her shoulder and drew up a window on the readout panel.

“ _These_ were our water levels just an hour ago, and _these_.” He summoned another window. “are our water levels now.”

She whistled lowly. “That’s a hell of a drop.” _Very_ bad news.

He nodded. “But, and you can see it if you really look, they’re still dropping.”

Squinting at the panel, she said, “And you can’t find any cause? Nothing at all?”

He shook his head. “Nope, same as the engine. I can’t explain it.” Of course, these things could never just be _easy_.

She clapped him on the back again and moved away from the filtration system. “I’ll go let the king know. You’d better get together the data and send it to him as soon as possible.” She walked over to the door. “Oh, and keep me posted if anything else big happens.”

He agreed and hurried back over to consult with his team.

Valkyrie strode off down the hall towards the upper decks, muttering to herself. “And I left Sakaar for _this shit?_ Figures.”

****

Thor’s brow wrinkled as he pored over the folder of numbers on his desk. None of his tutors had ever called him great at math, per se, but he got enough to realize what the numbers meant. In short, they were screwed.

He blew out a breath. “Dead in the water. Dead without water. Dead in the water without any water.”

Loki snorted from his place lying back on the bed like he owned the damn place, flipping a conjured dagger up into the air. “Pessimist. The mighty Thor. That I’d live to see the day.” 

Thor spun around in his chair to face him. “And you’re not being very helpful.”

“You’d worry that I’d been replaced if I was.” Loki arced the dagger up into the air with a flourish and caught it lazily with the other hand. “And, to continue the trend, I have more bad news if you so desire it.”

Thor rolled his eye. “I suppose you’d better go ahead and tell me.” He paused. “And _try_ not to be an ass about it.”

Loki clicked his tongue. “You’re being _so_ very demanding today, brother dear.” He sat up and crossed his legs under him, blade still in motion. “We’ve got reports from around the ship of the weakest people falling ill. You know, the sick, the elderly, children.” He counted the groups off on his fingers, letting the dagger drop onto the bedspread. “The usual suspects. Anyways, they’ve all come down with varying degrees of dehydration. And the symptoms don’t match up with a day or two without water, we’re talking effects that shouldn’t show up on an aesir until a couple of weeks without water.” He resumed his knife tricks, seemingly unconcerned.

Thor turned back to the numbers. “So…”

Loki stood and pulled out a chair next to him with an unnecessary scrape against the floor. “ _So_ , something’s taking the water. Out of _everything_.”

Thor sighed. “ _Magic_.”

“Almost certainly so. And I’d bet my boots, well, someone’s boots anyways, that the cause is on that ship.” Loki gestured with his dagger at the distant white speck floating in space outside of the small window.

“So, what, we sit here until we all dry out into husks, or?”

Loki suddenly stabbed the dagger into the table between Thor’s hands, effectively impaling the folder of numbers. “Or…we do something about it.”

Thor rubbed a hand at the skin under his eyepatch, headache building. Despite all of the things that had changed, Loki’s flair for dramatics remained well and intact. “You could’ve said instead of, you know, stabbing.”

Loki shrugged. “Takes the fun out of it.”

“So, what do we do then?”

The papers fluttered free as Loki dispelled the dagger with a flick of his fingers. “I don’t know, you’re the king here. You decide.”

Thor stared at him for a moment, half-plans whirling through his head one after the other, until he hit on something, made a choice, and surged to his feet.

Loki followed, “Ohhh no no no, I know that look. You’re going to do something stupid. And worse, you’re going to rope _me_ into it.

Thor made for the door. “We need to get out of the bubble of influence around that ship.”

“You said it yourself, we’re dead in the water. We don’t have any power?”

Thor smiled widely. “Don’t we?”

****

“I think that this is a terrible idea.”

Thor ignored his brother and pressed a hand against the cool metal of the outer main engine manifold. “So you’ve said. Many times.” He jiggled some of the wiring like he knew what he was doing. “You know, this’d probably be safer if you’d lend a hand with your magic, but I’m guessing you like watching me struggle more than you hate this plan.”

Loki kicked his heels against his perch atop an outcropping of important machinery. “Got it in one.” He leaned back against the wall. “But _really_ , this is a terrible way to approach this. Engines don’t just work by taking in huge bursts of raw power.”

Thor rapped a knuckle against the casing. “Don’t they?”

Loki sighed, “ _No_ , they don’t. But I suppose you’re just going to ignore my very good advice and proceed pig-headedly per usual.”

“And what else would you have me do? We’re not exactly swimming in options _or_ time.”

Loki tipped a hand at him. “Fair, but it doesn’t mean that I like it.”

Carefully pulling open a panel to reveal a cluster of power couplings, Thor answered without turning around, “Neither do I, but what can you do?” He braced his legs and reached into himself. Little bolts of lightning arced around his fingertips. “Contact Heimdall and make sure that he’s got us lined up in the right direction.”

Loki didn’t budge, affecting a relaxed position that Thor knew was a front from centuries of experience. “I’m sure that he does, disturbingly competent that man. Stop fiddling around and do it already if you’re going to. I’ve got terrible dry mouth and I’m getting rather tired of feeling the water evaporate from my body.”

Thor laid both hands on the exposed power couplings. It was ridiculous, really; he was a god of nature, stranded out in the yawning void of space, quite literally out of his element. He drove those thoughts away and then _pushed_.

A sky swollen with storm. Dark clouds rolling over darker hills. Wind whipping leaves from trees and tearing grass from the soil. A splitting. Rain beating pits into the earth. A sky gone green with frenzy, black with rage. A sky broken in half, breaking. Bone-rattling, ear-tearing thunder. A pause, a holding of breath. And then…and then…lightning lightning _lightning_. 

Everything went black.

****

When the aftershocks finally finished rolling through the ship, Loki shakily unfolded himself from his perch against the wall, rubbing his shoulders. Ooh, that’d all be black and blue by morning. His hair crackled with static when he ran a hand through it, little wisps reaching for his fingers. The short journey had been…far from comfortable, but he was pretty sure that he was at least all in one piece. And from the look of it, Thor was too.

His brother sprawled unceremoniously over the exposed engine, lightning still sparking off of his skin and filling the air with the thick stink of ozone. He was still breathing at least, so there was that. And his foolish plan had worked; he’d lit up like a bonfire, and, as far as Loki could tell, brought them to relative safety. He’d be insufferable about that when he came around.

Loki took a brief moment to send an all-clear signal through the comm panel up to Heimdall on the bridge, and then carefully shielded himself with a thin layer of magic, the minor effort straining at his already depleted reserves, and unceremoniously hefted the still-sparking Thor up over his shoulder. After checking that the corridor was empty (It was. Good that the citizenry knew well enough to hunker down when the ship started shaking. And even better that he wouldn’t be seen, lest his carrying Thor be taken as _sentiment_ , rather than the bare practicality that it was), he made his way towards Thor’s Quarters with the man in question slung gracelessly over his back.

Eventually, he made it to the room unseen with the application of some careful sneaking, and heaved Thor onto the bed with a grunt, dispelling his magic shield. The expenditure of seidr, as well as being minorly electrocuted, hadn’t helped the lurching ill feeling in the pit of his stomach. At least his mouth wasn’t dry anymore. But the engine was still dead, and probably worse off now from the big brute-force jolt of energy it had taken. Certainly, some of the overhead lights had been fried. 

When Thor woke up, it would be, perhaps, a good time to tell him about the tesseract. But…no, it was his way out; if he handed it over, he’d have no way to slip away if he needed to. The crisis had been averted anyways. And, if he was being strictly honest with himself, his magic was in no state to harness the tesseract for himself, much less for the entire ship. He half-fell into a chair, dropping his head into his hands. 

The distant singing had stopped. He hadn’t noticed how constant its presence was until it had gone. _What the hell is on that ship?_ It was magic certainly, and dangerous too, and somehow…familiar? He’d felt something like it before, though he couldn’t put a finger on it, but this was still different from that, disrupted somehow, desperate. He sighed, absentmindedly rubbing his chest with the back of a hand. His magic patch job had slipped a little, and he could feel it crumbling around the edges, could feel a ball of ice forming in his chest right under his hand. Could feel it pulsing and reaching for his heart and…

His hand jerked back as a bolt of cold shot through it. Shit shit _shit_. Little royal blue spots speckled the insides his fingers, and were slowly spreading like ink through water. Suddenly lightheaded with nausea, he bolted for the little bathroom, gorge rising. 

Making it to the toilet in time, his stomach convulsed and he hacked a few mouthfuls of watery yellow bile into the bowl. _Disgusting_. He was over a millennium old for heaven’s sake. _And_ , he was a natural shapeshifter. It was honestly embarrassing that he couldn’t maintain control over something so simple as his own body. 

He sat back against the wall, leaning his head against the cool metal, and inspected his hands. His left looked as it usually did, pale with a little scar across the ball of the thumb from sparring centuries ago, familiar. The other hand was stained completely blue up to the wrist at this point, the surface rougher and the nails a cloudy black. He dragged one of his unchanged fingers over the braided markings on the back of the hand. They were cold and slightly tough like thick cartilage or burn tissue. Did they mean anything? Would any jotunn who saw them know him as royalty, as an outcast, as a kinslayer? He didn’t know. He’d devoted half a lifetime to the pursuit of knowledge, and it made him uneasy, the possibility that somewhere under the skin he wore, he might be covered in a language that he couldn’t read. 

He dropped his hands to his sides and let his eyes fall shut. His body felt hot with rolling nausea, the ends of his limbs numb and distant, but still that cold lump pulsed in his core. He hated it because it felt like blessed relief. If he’d just let it go, it’d spread through him like a salve over a cut. His head would clear for the first time in…well, for the first time in a long while. But then, he knew, could feel the shape of the magic somehow, it’d crack him in half. Shatter him. He would break against the ice, would lose himself. No, it wasn’t worth it just because he was too weak to take a little queasiness.

He composed himself and sent a slow wash of magic over the affected limb, brow knitting as he strained. In his mind’s eye, weak threads of seidr wove around the hand, dragging the ragged edges of the glamor back up over it. The cold in his chest melted into a pinprick. Blood rushed in his ears as his stomach lurched. The room finally stopped swaying as the sickness settled in to stay. He relaxed.

When he opened his eyes, his hand had returned to normal. He took a minute to collect himself and splash some water on his face, then slunk back into the bedroom.

Throughout all of this, Thor had remained obliviously snoring away over on the bed. Small miracles. Limbs aching and itchy at the joints, he collapsed into a chair. His chin dropped to his chest, and, within moments, the room was silent but for the gentle breathing of both brothers.

****

Red emergency lights. A brushed-metal corridor. The rattling of a body struggling for breath. She imagined that if anyone stepped on her right now, she’d crunch right into pieces like an old dry leaf. She laughed at that, the slightest puff of air out of cracked lips. Her head lolled to the side involuntarily; the familiar vision of the ceiling slid out of view, and her eyes settled on Renen’s body a few feet away. Or…what was left of it. 

He’d been, like a lot of scavengers, a good bit stupid. And this situation had been, on the whole, his fault. But to die like he did…she wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Of course, she wouldn’t wish her current death on anyone either, and here she was, living it.

She’d been warned again and again about finds too good to be true by older crewmembers, but she hadn’t really listened. None of them had. The find of a lifetime…just appearing out of empty space; who could pass that up? Not them, that’s for sure. Her eyes fell half-shut. She didn’t even hurt anymore. 

But…wait. She tried to lift her head, but couldn’t. Something, someone was watching. Someone was standing behind her. She couldn’t see, but she could feel a shadow falling over her, a tangible presence in the air. She would’ve reached out if she were able.

And then it was gone. The feeling of it just…vanished. And once again she was utterly alone.

She let herself blow away.


End file.
